All posts tagged 3-D printing

BARCELONA—Let’s be honest, 3-D-printed food doesn’t exactly sound appetizing. You imagine pizza made out of some gray paste, or chickens printed to look like lobsters, or something. But a Barcelona startup is hoping to make 3-D food printers the machine of choice for the discerning foodie.

Natural Machines, based in the Barcelona Activa center in the west of the city, is working on a 3-D printer that will produce not just chocolates (there are plenty of companies that do that) but pasta (such as ravioli), breads—in fact, anything that starts life as a dough, paste or stiff liquid.

“I like to cook at home but I don’t have time to roll out pasta dough, or bread,” said Lynette Kucsma, a former Microsoft employee who joined the company earlier this year. “But I want to make fresh food. Printing a thin dough and a filling is not a problem.” The idea is that foodie geeks will set the machine up before they go to work, and have it timed to be ready when they get home.

Calling it 3-D printing may be giving the technology a rather grander title than it deserves. Essentially this is piping, but really precise piping—precise enough that they printed my face on a plate in tomato ketchup (why?). Apart from making things like pasta, other uses include decorating cakes or adding complicated designs to foods.

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